


Losing Your Head (and Other Sentimental Objects)

by chinchillasinunison



Series: Lord of the Flies Monster AU [3]
Category: Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Gen, Random & Short, Silly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-22 00:18:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14925773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chinchillasinunison/pseuds/chinchillasinunison
Summary: The monster boys lose some things and try to find them. That's... that's it.





	Losing Your Head (and Other Sentimental Objects)

“Maurice!” Jack’s high-pitched, hawk-like screech stretched across practically the whole island, “Maurice! _MAURICE!_ ”

The satyr tramped over, lamb haunches heavy after having just been awoken from a lovely nap.

“What? What is it, Chicken Legs?” he asked, rubbing his eye, voice still a bit slurred.

“ _Don't_ call me Chicken Legs!” he snarled back, “I don't want to hear anything out of you! Now, tell me where it is.”

“Where’s what?”

“Oh, you know!”

Maurice stared up at his siren leader, blinking the tiredness out of his eyes.

“...no, really, I have no idea what we're talking about. I’ve been asleep on-and-off all day. Henry can vouch for me.”

The little living poppet waved his stub of an arm, “It’s true!”

Jack’s brow furrowed.

“Damn it. There goes suspect #1.”

“For what?” asked the satyr.

Jack inhaled deeply, the feathers on his chest puffing out.

“ _Somebody_ took my hunting knife!”

Maurice raised an eyebrow.

“Really? That's what's got you all upset?” he said, hands on his woolly hips, “Jack, you’ve practically got knives growing out of your toes, and even one on your face! Why would you _want_ your knife anymore, especially since you don't even have the fingers to hold it?”

Jack covered his beak with his wing, perhaps a bit self-conscious because of Maurice’s practical reasonings against his desires. That and he referenced the beak itself, which was a part of Jack’s new anatomy he wasn’t exactly thrilled about.

“Sentimental value…” he mumbled through his plumage.

“Well, either way, I don't have it,” Maurice informed him, “Why would you even think I took it, anyway?”

“I dunno. You’re the jokester here, so I thought maybe you--”

Jack jarred forward as someone rammed into him from behind.

“Hey! Why don't you watch where you’re going!?” the siren squawked, spinning around to face the perpetrator.

Roger, or rather, Roger's headless body, attempted to regain its footing which it lost due to the bump. After it steadied itself, its hands patted at Jack's feathered chest, trying to confirm the other's identity.

Jack looked him up and down, the corners of his mouth curled into an annoyed grimace.

“What's the matter with you? Have you lost your head again?”

Roger couldn't hear in this state, obviously, but he could feel Jack's chest vibrate with speech, and made a reasonable assumption about the direction of the conversation. He pointed to his neck stump and shrugged his opposite shoulder.

“I’d take that as a yes,” commented Maurice.

“Well, that makes two things that have gone missing then, hasn't it?” Jack thought aloud. He peered all around them with his sharp hawk eyes a moment, as if he were expecting the items to simply appear spontaneously on the horizon, then turned back to Roger. He clapped one of his wings on the dullahan’s back, and the body stumbled a bit forward from the unexpected blow.

“Come on, then! Let's get a move on!” ordered the leader, “We won't get any closer to finding them just standing about, after all!”

Maurice grabbed Roger by the arm and led him along as Jack Merridew confidently marched forward.

* * *

 

“Ralph! _RALPH!_ You overgrown goldfish, look at me while I'm talking!” Jack cawed as he and his gang approached the young gill-man, who was sitting on a rock, dangling his feet in the water of the lagoon.

Ralph turned around and sighed, “What do you want?”

“ _Someone_ on this island, I don't know who, is taking other people's property. He already took my knife and Roger's head. As chief, you’ve got to do something about it!”

Ralph squinted up at him, that siren with his razor-sharp beak and talons.

“Why would you even need a knife?” he said with a slight shake of the head.

“That's what I said!” Maurice piped, raising his hands in exasperation.

Jack again grumbled his “sentimental value” line in reply to the question, but not distinct enough for Ralph to understand it. He asked the siren to repeat what he said, but Jack just groaned and snapped, “Who cares?! Why don't you just do something about it already?!”

“Alright, alright, geez! Keep your head on!” Ralph said with an eye roll, then remembered the state of one of the other parties and added quickly, “No offense, Roger.”

“He can't exactly take any,” Maurice clarified for the second time today, “No ears right now and all…”

“Right, right...” Ralph said with a nod, not really caring, “So anyway, Jack, I’ll call an assembly so we can ask around if anyone's seen your things. That's as good a place as any to start.”

He stood up and walked over to another section of rocks, then stood there, silently surveying it for a few seconds.

“Hey! Who moved the conch?!”

He scanned about the rocks, looking for a splotch of pink and tan and finding nothing.

“Jack, have you seen…”

He didn’t finish the question, for he realized as he was saying it how foolish it was.

“Well,” the gill-boy sighed, “it looks like we’ll have to ask around person to person. That’ll take a while…”

Jack seemed to reluctantly accept this plan, but then, the red feathers atop his head stood on end as inspiration entered his brain.

“Or… we could ask the one who’s already where all the missing things are!”

“Umm…” Ralph cocked a scaly eyebrow in confusion, “isn’t that what we’re trying to figure out?”

“No, no, I don’t mean _them_ ,” Jack elucidated, stretching his wing around Roger’s headless body, which stiffened in surprise, “I mean _him_. If all the stolen things are in the same place, that means his head is there too. That means he has at least some idea of where they’re hidden, based on what he can see.”

“Jack, that’s brilliant!”

He grinned in conceit, chest feathers fluffing, “I know…” The look on Ralph’s face showed he immediately regretted feeding the other's massive ego.

Jack turned. “Maurice…”

“Yessir!” the satyr responded with a salute. He trotted to the edge of the wood and poked around for a loose branch. Soon he picked one up and carried it over. He secured it in Roger’s hand and stabbed it into the solid sand. Roger seemed to get the impression that this meant to duplicate said action, and began jabbing the ground in a frenzy, unsure of what real purpose the exercise served. Maurice frantically went to correct him, grabbing his arm and gently guiding the stick through the sand to produce the letter “B” as an example. Now Roger comprehended what was being asked of him, and went about writing in the sand. The other three waited impatiently for him to finish, and when he did, he stepped away for all to see. Carved in the packed sand were three letters:

R-E-D

“Red? That’s it?” Maurice's ears pressed back and he squinted critically.

“Well, it's a clue, I guess…” Ralph admitted with a shrug of the shoulder.

“Hmm…” Jack's brow furrowed, “What do we know that's red?”

“You!” Ralph playfully prodded his wing.

“That doesn't help us any.”

“Well, what else is there here that's mostly red?”

The three monster boys quietly thought this over and all simultaneously came to the same conclusion:

_“PIGGY!”_

* * *

 

Jack Merridew straggled down the beach on awkward bird legs grumbling obscenities under his breath as Ralph tried to talk him down from his rage. Maurice was ahead of them, using his superior sense of smell to sniff out the cherry-scented suspect. And soon they saw his bright red color, in a tucked away pasture inside the jungle.

“I mean, if you stopped squirming so much I might be able to get it out,” another voice spoke.

Jack jumped out of the foliage and seemed ready to strike Piggy, but a certain sphinx guarded him with a swipe and a snarl and made Jack screech to a halt and fumble over his still unfamiliar body parts.

As the other two came out, Jack sat up and the three saw over Simon crouching form Roger's head suspended in the gelatin of Piggy’s tummy, along with Jack's knife and the conch, as pieces of fruit might in a normal gelatin dessert.

“Why you--!” Jack squealed, then held his wing to his throat, “Ow, ow…”

“That's what happens when you scream all the time, mate...” Maurice shook his head.

Ralph stepped forward. “Piggy, why? Why’d you take all our stuff?”

Piggy twitched nervously, tapping his fingers together. Simon eased out of his defensive stance and addressed the group.

“It's not his fault. I found him like this in the morning, before I put his glasses back on.”

He was making reference to Piggy’s new nightly ritual of deactivating himself when everyone else fell asleep. As a golem, he could no longer sleep, nor had any need to, unlike the other organic beings around him. That made his days significantly longer and more lonely, so he’d decided to let himself temporarily shut off every night and get reactivated by Simon in the morning. That meant, of course, that he couldn't really do anything in that intervening time, because he wasn't “alive.”

“...so somebody else did it then?”

He nodded.

“Dammit! We’re back to square one!” Jack griped, beating his wings on the ground.

“Well, can't he at least get it out?” Ralph asked.

Piggy demonstrated how this wasn't really possible, by reaching for the seashell inside him but unable to break his thick, malleable surface.

Ralph shook his head and bit his lower lip, “Great, that's… great…”

Maurice turned around. “Sorry Rodge-Podge…” he apologized, even though he knew Roger wouldn't be able to hear it. Then he blinked his eyes open in realization.

“Wait, where’s Roger?”

Simon pointed a claw at Piggy's belly, “Uh, right here.”

“No, no, not his head! His body!”

“I dunno,” Jack shrugged, “we must've left him on the beach!”

“I mean, he might've figured out we left and went to go follow us…” Ralph suggested.

Just then, the group heard more rustling in the bushes. All of them stood on edge as a new figure emerged.

“Ow! Hey, hey!”

“Watch it with those hands!”

It was the twins, in the strange form they now occupied, the lion head growling and the goat head bleating with discomfort. They were being shoved along, as it turned out, by Roger.

“Ralph!” whined the white goat, “get Jack to call him off! He’s bein’ awful handsy with us…”

Jack pushed himself off the ground, stalking towards them and grinning in a smartass way, “Hmm... I wonder why that is! It might be ‘cause he can't tell who you are. Ya know, ‘cause his head is gone! You _freaks_ wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Both tried to withstand Jack's scrutinous glare, but it was a losing battle. Those baby blues were icy, freezing anything they came into contact with and making everything in their path shiver. They folded almost immediately.

“It was him! Erm, he did it! I-it was all his idea, not mine, I just went along with it!” the pair blurted simultaneously, a hoof and a paw on either side of the body pointing to the opposing brother as the mastermind.

Jack rolled his eyes. “I should've known it was you lot. Twins are always pulling something…”

“Well…” Ralph addressed the chimera, “go get that stuff out!”

The beast wriggled out of the dullahan’s grasp and rushed up to Piggy.

“Your specs,” requested the lion’s head, Eric, plainly.

The golem removed the object engraved with his shem and instantly froze, the glasses falling to the ground.

The chimera, with great care, breathed little flames onto the golem’s fat, filled belly. This gentle application of heat melted the gelatin, and the lion’s paw sifted through the now softer jelly. It tossed out the conch and the knife with ease, then Eric's paw wrapped around Roger's head. Sam’s goat hoof assisted his brother as both pulled the body part out of its sugary prison. When it was finally out in the open air, it was found to be coated in a thin layer of sticky cherry juice. Chunks of jelly were caught in Roger's long hair, and his damp bangs were flat against his face.

“Welcome back, Rog,” Maurice greeted as the twins presented the head, “How ya doin’?”

The head took a breath it didn't really need, and spoke rapidly, “Idon’tknowreallyIwassortamadforawhileintherebutwithallthattastystuffaroundmeIdidn’treallymindit’sfunnyifIatethismuchcandyasapersonI’dgetsickbutmystomach’snotattachedtomymouthanymoresoIcan’tgetsicksothat’sgoodboydoIlovecandy!”

He clenched his jaw shut in a huge grin, vibrating from his sugar high, and his body grabbed the head and tucked it beneath its arm.

Ralph sighed as he lifted the conch off the ground, “Well, isn’t this nice? Everything worked out in the end!”

“Yeah, I guess that is pretty-- oh, wait, hold on...” Jack bent over to pick up his knife, but then remembered he didn’t have hands. He attempted to use his talons to pick it up and kept failing, yet still kept insisting for the others to stick around. They got bored with him after he started trying to grab it with his beak.

Eventually he stood back up, frustrated, and said to no one, “Ya know what? I’ll just leave it behind.”


End file.
